I have been using a free co-op advertising network (aff.).

Since I have been using it my backlinks have increased from a few hundred to a few thousand, last check showed my abstract art  site at over 15,000 backlinks and have done wonders for my serps and page rank.

It’s easy to use, you just upload a couple of files to your site and then add the bit of code that displays the ads. You can choose how many ads you want to display from 1 – 5 and can display them horizontally or vertically anywhere on you site, but the code must be used site wide, best thing to do is put the code in the footer code of your site. Once you have submitted your site to DP and your code is set up and they have validated your site you will receive a weight; this is calculated based on various factors, how many pages you have the code on, how many pages are indexed by Google and how many time the ads are shown on your site, this weight will go up as more ads are displayed on your site. You can then use this weight to set up your own ads that will be displayed on other peoples sites.

If you go into your account at DP you can write your first ad, if you use some text you want to rank well on search engines for i.e “art blog” use this keyword as your anchor text and again in your description and you will notice an improvement in serps over time. It takes DP admin about 24 hours to approve your ad and you must remember to enable it in your ad section.

Once your ad has been running for a few days, and it does take a few days for your ad/ads to start being shown on other sites,  you can check how many impressions your ad is getting on other people sites by clicking on the stats link next to the ad you have set up.

A working example of the free ad network can been seen here in my new free article directory  if you look at the footer under the copyright info you will see the 5 links I have set up to display.

The free article directory is the next tip for getting free links back to your site or blog; just write a article on something you like and include a link back to your site, I will approve all articles within 24 hours and if they are good I will feature them on the homepage which will not only help backlinks but should also drive traffic from the free article directory to your site/blog etc.

This post was written by Kathryn Crocker of Mazoo Art Blog and Mazoo Abstract Art.